Freight Fate 1.9 tester snapshot 2026-08-30

Preview snapshot for players who want the newest features before the next stable release. Expect rough edges; your save files stay compatible whenever possible, but back them up first.

Changes in this snapshot

Added

• Career 1.9 tester snapshots are ready to play. The Windows portable zip for each Career 1.9 prerelease build now includes the music and required audio libraries. Players using a Career 1.9 tester snapshot can move to newer prerelease builds by choosing Update channel: developer snapshots.
• The list of drivers on duty keeps itself up to date while you read it. Open Drivers on duty from the Online menu and the list now checks again on its own about once a minute, so drivers who set off or sign off turn up without you pressing Refresh. It does the checking quietly and never speaks over you. The list is in alphabetical order by driver name and stays that way, so when it changes, a line is rewritten and nothing moves under you. If a driver signs off while you are sitting on their line, the line stays where it is and tells you they went off duty, until you arrow away from it. Refresh is still there for when you want to ask straight away, and it still answers out loud. If a quiet check cannot reach the site, you keep the drivers you already had rather than losing the list.
• Live internet radio starts sooner after you tune it. Freight Fate now begins live stations with a smaller network cushion and a much shorter fade, while still connecting away from the driving loop so steering and safety cues stay responsive.
• Truck status is now a list you can review. At the terminal, choose Truck status and use the arrow keys to hear assignment and eligibility, fuel, condition, each wear reading, road grime, and snow chains one at a time. Enter repeats just the line you are on, and Escape returns to the terminal.
• Two new songs on the country stations. "Dangerous Dan", an outlaw country song, and "Dial-up Summer", a country ballad about a summer spent online instead of outdoors. Both join the rotation on The Rawhide 98.1, Big Wheel Country 104.5, Prairie Line 95.7 and Big Sky Country 99.3, so they can turn up on any of the four the same as the rest of the country library. Press Tab at the wheel to hear what is playing.
• Alt C says the CB chatter again. The CB tells you what is sitting up the road, and it goes by once: miss it, or have a landmark or a lane count spoken over the top of it, and there was no way back to it. Alt C at the wheel now says the last CB call again on its own. Only the voice comes back, not the squelch that marked it, and the distance is the distance from where you are now, so a call you first heard at four miles comes back at two if that is where you are. Once you have gone by what the CB called, it tells you that instead. If the CB has not said anything yet, it says so rather than going quiet, and it answers at every speech setting, including the quiet ones, because you asked for it. Thanks to marrie for asking for this.
• Exit ramps now use real advisory signs where the map has them. Freight Fate matched trusted OpenStreetMap readings to 6,539 interchanges and keeps each direction separate. Missing signs still use the existing calculated ramp speed. Because ordinary ramp signs are usually passenger-vehicle guidance, a read sign can make the truck's target slower but can never make it faster than the game's existing conservative ramp calculation.
• Trucks climb hills like trucks. Heavy traffic used to hold its speed up a mountain grade the same as it did across Kansas, so a line of trucks was a wall all doing the same number with nothing to choose between them. A loaded tractor now loses the hill the way a real one does -- down into the twenties on a long six percent -- while a light box truck holds forty-odd up the same climb. So the trucks string out on a grade, the light ones work past the heavy ones, and a climb finally sounds different from the flat.
• Real time joins the driving mode row. Under Settings, Gameplay, Difficulty and hours of service, the Driving mode row now offers Relaxed, Standard, and Real time. Real time runs the driving clock at the speed of a real clock, so a mile takes as long as it really would and a driving day takes a real day; it keeps Standard's pressure, hazards, and speech. Set the weather source to real world as well and the drive is as true to life as the game gets. Like the other two it can be changed mid-drive from the pause menu, and the clock follows at once. Parked waiting with the brake set, which fast-forwards the other two pacings, stays at real speed in Real time. Breaks and sleep at stops still pass the clock the way they always have. The date and time you hear now also start in step with your computer's clock when you choose Real time or begin a drive with it already selected. Career progress, delivery time remaining, and hours of service do not jump when the clocks line up.
• A Radio app on the driver tablet. Under Tab, Driver apps, Radio: it says what is playing, switches the radio on or off, saves the tuned station to your favorites or removes it, lists your favorites, and lists every station that comes in where you are. Search stations asks you to type part of a name, call sign, or format, the same way you type a driver name, and lists every match on the whole dial, the ones you can get here first; Enter on any station tunes it, and a favorite that is out of range says so instead. Picking a station switches a radio that was off back on.
• Shift and Y says what the station is playing. Real streams that send song information get "Now playing on : - <title>"; a station that does not send it, or is still connecting, says that instead. The same line is on the Tab radio screen and in the Radio app, and the drivers board shows it after the station name while the radio is on.
• Phoenix Fire FM is on the dial as a named station. Requested by Jerry. It used to be there only as the community directory's "PhoenixFireFM" row.
• Sunny 1100 WGPA is on the dial everywhere. The Bethlehem, Pennsylvania station that plays classic country, rockabilly and western swing now comes in anywhere in the country, the way the other web stations do.
• City streets into a facility now run at your state's own speed limit. The last mile in to a warehouse or yard used to be a flat twenty-five everywhere in the country. It now uses the speed each state's own law sets for a street with no sign on it, so the run in is thirty-five in Idaho, Kentucky, and North Carolina, thirty across much of the south and midwest, twenty in Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia, and twenty-five where that is what the state says. Four states in five are covered; the rest keep the old twenty-five, either because their law sets no street speed at all or because their statute book could not be read first-hand. The gate itself is still fifteen everywhere.
• Cross traffic is real at ramp ends: listen for your gap. The road a ramp ends on now carries simulated vehicles -- cars, pickups, semis, even a farm tractor -- each one audible in the ear it comes from, close or far by how it sounds. At a stop sign, "clear, pull ahead" now waits for a real gap and names what is crossing while you hold. At a red light the cross street is audibly busy, and a green is the sound of that stream dying. Running a sign or a light meets whatever is really there: an empty crossroad lets the gamble pay, a near miss earns a hard horn, and a vehicle in the window is still the clip it always was.
• Yield signs and roundabouts at ramp ends, where the map really has them. About fourteen hundred exits whose ramps truly end at a give-way or a roundabout now say so and play by yield rules: slow, listen for your gap, roll through at low speed if the road is clear, and stop only when it is not. Stopping is always legal, and route-transition assistance rolls a clear yield instead of braking to a needless stop.
• Live traffic alerts now cover Florida and New York. With Traffic source set to real time, drives through Florida and New York now hear real crashes, closures, and other incidents from each state's own 511 service, the way Indiana, Minnesota, and Colorado already do -- not just road work. Alerts are spoken as you approach them, with the road name and which lanes are affected.
• Company drivers occasionally get sent empty to a nearby city, dispatch's call, not yours. The dispatch board now sometimes carries a carrier-assigned reposition alongside the usual loads: a deadhead run to a nearby city where freight is running thicker. It pays a reduced rate for the empty miles, same as a real carrier pays deadhead, and it still earns career experience like any other completed run. Turning one down costs dispatch trust, not money -- there is no load to walk away from, but there is still an assignment. This only shows up for company drivers; owner-operators keep repositioning on their own terms from the "Bobtail to a nearby city" menu.
• A weigh station transponder can wave a clean truck past the scale. Company drivers get one free once dispatch trusts them with it, at career level 4; owner-operators can subscribe to one from Business status. With a transponder, an open scale now runs a quick check as you approach: a green light means you are cleared to keep rolling with no exit needed, and a red light sends you in to pull in exactly as before. A legal load is cleared most of the time, but never every time -- real weigh stations still spot-check compliant trucks, and an overweight load is always called in. No transponder yet, and nothing changes: every open scale still asks every truck to pull in.
• The horn runs on brake air, like a real truck's -- protection valve included. The air horn and the brakes share the tanks, so leaning on the horn costs measurable pressure -- but a real tractor's pressure protection valve means the horn can never take the brakes down with it: run the air low enough and the horn goes silent while the brakes keep what is left. Honk your way across Kansas and the truck stays safe; the serenade just ends early.
• The horn can move an animal off the road. One good blast at an animal hazard gives it a chance to clear before you reach it -- dogs, coyotes, and livestock usually move; deer and elk freeze more often than they bolt, so braking stays the instruction and the horn is a bonus, never the plan. One try per animal: the one that ignored you has decided. Thanks to Shane for the idea -- and to Brandon for the rebuttal, because the animals that just stare at you are in there too.
• State welcome signs are read at the border. Crossing a state line now reads that state's welcome sign -- the nickname and a true bit of roadside trivia, the way the real sign does. The lines were written for every state a while ago and had never been wired to speak; Brandon asked why, which was a fair question. The billboard chatter switch governs them.
• A real freight detour around the Million Dollar Highway. A new drivable corridor runs from Durango west on US-160 and north on US-491 and US-191 -- through Mancos, Cortez, Dove Creek, and Monticello to Moab -- the road real carriers use instead of US-550's high passes. Dispatch now routes through freight that way: Colorado's DOT publishes standing truck warnings for the passes and most carriers ban them, so the game treats the pass as a road to avoid, not a road to forbid. Loads that genuinely serve Durango, Silverton country, or Montrose still drive it, hairpins and all. Thanks to Jerry, whose Farmington-to-Montana run over Red Mountain Pass is why this exists.
• Cruise control adapts to the weather -- on purpose, better than the real thing. Real adaptive cruise gets blinded by heavy rain and simply quits; this one slows to the safe speed instead and says so -- "Thunderstorm; adaptive cruise easing to 40 miles per hour" -- then climbs back as the weather lifts. The safe speed was already spoken as guidance on the status keys; now the automation honors it. Thanks to Brandon for the suggestion.
• Traffic jams where traffic really jams. The game now knows how many vehicles a day each stretch of road actually carries, taken from the federal highway survey, so congestion is placed from real volumes instead of a rough guess that almost never produced a jam. Run I-5 through Los Angeles or I-15 out of Santa Ana at five in the afternoon and you will meet stop-and-go, because those roads genuinely are over capacity then; the same roads at three in the morning are clear, and a quiet rural highway never jams at all.
• You can choose how much room the truck leaves to the vehicle ahead. A new Following gap setting in Settings, Gameplay, Driving assistance offers close, normal or far -- two and a half, three, or three and a half seconds. Adaptive cruise used to decide this entirely on its own, which meant a trooper could pull you over for a following distance you had no say in. Bad weather still opens the gap further whichever you pick, so close never means close on ice, and all three leave you well clear of a ticket. Asked for after Darren was stopped for exactly that.
• Distant stations no longer clutter the dial. Tuning has always put the strongest station first, but a handful of big stations were reaching so far that Houston, Tulsa, Austin and Oklahoma City all turned up on the Dallas dial from two hundred miles away and more, so half of what you scanned past was noise you would never choose. Nothing reaches past a hundred and fifty miles now, and the Dallas dial went from thirty-three stations with fifteen in the weeds to twenty-two with four. Out in country where there is little else on the band, the far-off station is still there -- that is where it earns its place. High ground still hears what the flats cannot.
• Game sound can step back while the road talks. A new option drops the engine, the weather, and the radio to half volume while the road voice speaks, restoring them the moment the line finishes, so a warning survives a loud cab without the voice itself getting louder. It is off by default -- the engine note is how many drivers read their speed, so nothing changes unless you ask. If game sound talks over your speech, turn it on under Settings, Audio, "Game sounds step back for speech."
• Sixty new billboards along the highways. Seventeen fresh roadside jokes about diesel prices, tiny parking lots, and questionable steakhouses join the rotation everywhere. And on the corridors that raised the music, tribute signs now mark the territory: Bakersfield Sound country on the way up the valley, Hank Williams's Alabama, Johnny Cash's delta bottomland, and the Franklin County Trucking Company's own home turf on the road through Missouri. Billboards still respect the roadside chatter setting. Twenty-two of the jokes were written by Tim K, who sent a page of them over -- the washing machine full of rocks, the six-space parking lot and the burger that needs a second trailer are all his.
• Learn what every sound means before you meet it at speed. A new Learn game sounds screen on the main menu, and on the pause menu while you drive, plays any cue the road uses on demand. Arrow to a sound, press Enter to hear it exactly as the drive plays it -- panned to the side it comes from, held for as long as it would really run -- and press F1 for what it is telling you and what to do about it. Sounds that explain themselves, like the engine and the weather, are left out so the list stays worth reading.
• The game now tells you when you are backing the wrong way. You could put the truck in reverse on the open highway and back up for as long as you liked, giving the route back mile after mile, and the only thing you would hear was the navigation still calling out the exit you were reversing away from. Now the truck speaks up: first that you are still in reverse and moving away from your destination, then that backing on a travelled lane is illegal and how much of the route you have given up, and if you keep going, traffic finds you. Backing where it is your job -- in the yard, at a stop, lining up on the receiver's dock -- stays silent, as it should.
• The alpha test book now comes with the build. The checklists are written against particular builds, so testers had to go and find the current copy for themselves and could easily end up working an old one. Every download now carries it alongside the manual and the changelog, as both a plain text file and a page you can open in a browser.
• The truck now tells you when the lane you passed in is open again. Moving over to pass was a one-way trip: nothing said when you were clear of the slower vehicle, so coming back was a guess and a mirror you cannot check. Once you are past and there is room to spare, the truck says so -- "Clear of the box truck. Right lane open." -- once, using the same judgment that decides a sideswipe, so a lane it calls open is a lane you can take. Press L any time for the same reading on demand: your lane, and whether each neighbouring lane is open, blocked, or closed.
• You now choose which career is your public one. Your public profile on orinks.net shows one career. Until now that was quietly whichever career happened to back up first, so playing several careers could put the wrong one's level, statistics, and badges on your profile. The Cloud backup menu now says "your public career" on the career that fronts your profile, and every backed-up career offers "Make this your public career," with a spoken confirmation before anything changes. Your other careers keep backing up privately; they just stay off your profile.
• Tank freight, and a load that keeps moving after you stop. Bulk fuel and liquid food open late in your career, and they drive like nothing else: a part-full tank runs forward when you brake and comes back into you a beat later, so a half-full smooth-bore tanker needs a third more room to stop than a dry van. You hear the wave running before you feel it push, which is the whole skill -- brake early, brake once, and let it settle. Baffles calm it front to back but do nothing side to side, and a bend is where a tanker gets you. The walk-around tells you how full the tank is and what kind it is.
• Police are on the road now, whoever you are. Enforcement sits at real places -- medians, work zones, the apron of a closed scale, town limits -- and whether you are seen depends on distance, sight lines over crests and round bends, weather, and whether you are running in a pack. A clean driver hears police often and pays nothing; a habitual speeder gets stopped three or four times in five hundred miles. And speeding you were never seen doing no longer bills you at the dock: an invisible charge from an officer who was never there is gone.
• A wrecked truck now drives like one, and eventually not at all. Damage used to cost you a little acceleration and nothing else, so a truck at ninety-nine percent still ran down the highway. Now the engine holds power back and burns more fuel past fifty percent, winds down to a forty-five mile an hour cap past seventy-five, warns you at eighty-five, and at ninety percent the truck is out of service: you get ten miles an hour to clear the lane, and then road service has to come to you. Every step is announced before you feel it, and the cap eases in rather than snapping. Repairs cost far more the longer you put them off.
• Bring a company truck back wrecked and the carrier notices. An owner-operator pays the whole repair and waits. A company driver pays nothing for it, but dispatch grounds the tractor, puts you in a yard spare for the rest of the run, charges a deductible, voids the safety bonus, and logs preventable damage against your record -- and a pattern of that costs the seat.
• Your freight can be damaged, and the receiver can refuse it. Hard stops, cornering far too fast, and collisions now hurt the load, and the dock inspects before it signs. A little damage is noted as an exception, more becomes a claim against the carrier, and a load in bad enough shape is refused outright -- no pay for the haul at all, and a claim on top. You hear the load take it at the time, and you can check its condition while you drive.
• Traffic law now follows you through your whole career. Fines scale with how far over you were and climb with every citation you have already collected, and the serious ones go on a record that outlives the trip. Two serious violations in three years suspends your CDL for sixty days and takes driving jobs off the dispatch board until it clears; three costs a hundred and twenty days. Running from a traffic stop is a felony that disqualifies you for a year, and a second one ends that driver's commercial career for good -- so running is now something you have to deliberately choose, with the cost read to you before you commit. Every citation already on your record makes the next one dearer, up to a limit: the money stops climbing after the third, and from there it is your record that keeps getting worse, not your wallet. Your standing is always available to ask for, and the game warns you before the next violation is the one that lands. A driver who keeps it clean sees none of this.
• Dispatch trusts you less as your reputation falls. A good record gets you the whole board and your pick of loads. As reputation slides you see fewer and worse-paying dispatches, lose the right to choose your own load, and get a smaller allowance for turning work down; at the bottom your carrier lets you go. Clean, on-time runs rebuild it, and the game tells you which way you are moving.
• Falling asleep at the wheel is now on your record. Running off the road asleep costs reputation as a preventable safety incident, and doing it again becomes a fatigued-driving violation on your CDL. When you cannot stay awake at all, the truck is genuinely stopped and you are out of service for ten hours -- the same rule a real inspector would apply.
• Blow past the facility gate and you now miss it. Arriving used to be automatic no matter how fast you came in. Now the approach warns you ahead of the gate with the speed to slow to, and if you carry past too fast anyway, you miss the entrance: the game takes you to the next safe turnaround and loops you back for another approach while the clock keeps running, so a hot approach can cost you a deadline. Miss it twice and the game offers braking help. The destination approach assist always makes the gate for you.
• Weigh stations are on the map. Eighty-seven real scales across thirty-two states are now stops on the routes that sign them, so the scale rules the game already had -- checking in, and what happens if you roll past an open one -- finally have somewhere to happen.
• Towns now enforce their engine brake ordinances. Like real municipal noise rules, cities and towns along your route are no engine brake zones. Coming up on one with the engine brake switched on, you hear a spoken heads-up; keep it barking inside the zone and a local officer writes an on-the-spot fine that grows if you keep doing it. Descending a real grade, reacting to a hazard, and retarding raised by cruise or the curve assist are never fined, and open-road engine braking is untouched. Your delivery summary lists any citations paid. Cruise and the curve assist mind the signs like a courteous driver: inside a zone they switch the engine brake off and hold speed with the service brakes instead, saying once why the engine note changed -- unless a real downgrade makes the engine brake the safe tool.
• Live traffic and truck parking cover far more of the map. Real incident and road-work reports are back in Indiana and now on in Minnesota and Colorado, and real work-zone reports arrive in ten more states, from Florida to New York to Arizona. Live truck-parking counts moved to Wisconsin's real-time sites and now work wherever a state publishes them, instead of only near one test area. States without a public feed keep the usual simulated traffic.
• Public profiles now tell more of your career, and the drivers board hears your radio. With Profile sharing on, your board line names the station you are tuned to while you drive, and your public career statistics grow to include lifetime career earnings, badges earned, endorsements, and, for company drivers, your carrier fleet tier. Lifetime earnings is the running total your career has ever earned; the money you currently have is never published, and the sharing disclosure now says both halves plainly.
• The whole map got its roadside signs. The curated billboard sweep is baked everywhere now: two hundred thirty-three real-place signs across every region -- up from forty-two in five regions -- so Florida, the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, Appalachia, and the rest finally pass their own roadside culture, from the Overseas Highway to Route 66, each sign at its attraction's real milepost. Meteor Crater, Standin' on the Corner, the Wigwam Motel, the Boll Weevil Monument, Little America, and Leavenworth's Bavarian village all made the cut, and fifty-nine respectful landmark callouts ride along.
• Achievements are now browsed by category. The achievements screen opens on seven categories -- Out on the Road, The Working Day, Career and Rank, The Dial and Song Towns, Weather and the Calendar, Places on the Map, and Deep Cuts -- each spoken with how many you have earned of its total. Enter a category to review its badges: earned ones tell their story, locked ones keep to their title, and a few hidden ones stay a secret the manifest is keeping until you find them. With the catalog past one hundred seventy badges, one flat list had become a long listen.
• Thirty-one new original songs and beds across the game. The country originals batch joins the music: new daytime and nighttime driving beds, ten more songs on the country stations, and a brand-new station -- Nashville After Hours -- playing late-night Nashville jazz and crossover instrumentals. Careers that reach level 21 also get a new menu theme of their own.
• Thousands more real stations on the dial. Most of the map now has its real local radio around it: over eight hundred commercial country, rock, sports, talk and oldies stations that come in only near their real transmitters, layered under the curated public, community, college, and AFN stations already there. Past everything local, a new Web radio band carries five thousand internet stations from everywhere, most popular first, one category jump to skip past. Real streams stay behind the same switch as before, and streamer-safe mode still keeps to the game's own stations and your playlists. Built on the station catalog contributed by CatalystForChaos in pull request 150.
• Save your stations with O. While driving, O keeps the current station as a favorite, and pressing it again lets the station go. Favorites are their own dial category right after your playlists, one category jump from anywhere, so the stations you like are never buried in a dial of thousands. A favorite only plays where it can be received, and favorites stay with your career save.
• Tuning a dead station no longer freezes the cab. The radio now connects to a stream in the background and gives up on a station that will not answer, so the drive keeps moving while it tries. A station that cannot come back is announced and the radio falls back the way it always has.
• Career 1.9 now uses the approved sound mix everywhere. Source checkouts and packaged builds carry the same sound pack, while the original sound library recordings remain private and are not distributed in the repository.
• Roadside sleep now works from T when the truck is fully stopped. Away from a route stop, T opens the existing emergency shoulder-sleep warning instead of saying there is no point of interest. Route stops still take priority. The truck is secured before a sleep menu opens, so setting the parking brake at walking pace and pausing cannot leave you rolling between two unavailable choices.
• Five more AFN bases on the dial. Iwakuni, Kunsan, Misawa, Okinawa, and Sasebo join the AFN section, all of them Pacific stations carrying The Eagle. That brings the AFN list to twenty-three bases you can tune from anywhere on the map when nothing local is in range.
• Steer through curves by ear. With steering assist on, the road sound now leans toward where the wheel should go: it slides into a bend as the bend arrives and leads you through it, and when you drift it sits toward lane center so you can follow it home. Centered on a straight road it stays put and nothing new plays. Drift to the road edge and the boundary answers with real textures from the side it happens on: a ragged stutter as your tires clip the rumble strip, a steady buzz fully on it, and loose gravel once you are off the pavement. On an undivided road the warning tells the truth: past the centerline you are in the oncoming lane, and there is no gravel out there. Ahead of a true hairpin, warning bars cut across the whole lane wake you up the way the real ones do -- three hard grouped rumbles under all your tires, far enough out that braking after them still makes the curve. The I key adds an on-demand lane locator: a soft repeating tock from wherever you sit in your lane, and pressing I again turns it off. Entering a demanding bend ticks a bright cue from the bend's side, and coming out the far side the co-driver gives the verdict: held your line, caught the edge, or through it hot. Changing lanes, your tires roll over the lane line's raised markers -- the front-to-back thump-roll of a real crossing, from the side you crossed. A new setting, lane and edge cue loudness, sets how loud all of it speaks: subtle, standard, or prominent.
• The road tells you how many lanes it has. Your road status now says the lanes on your side of the road -- "divided, three lanes your side" on an interstate, "two lanes your side" on a smaller highway -- and your trip briefing sums it up before you roll. As the road widens or narrows, you hear it: "road widens to three lanes", "down to two lanes your side". It reads the real road, so where the map has no lane data it stays quiet rather than guess, and the extra callouts hush in terse speech. Lane numbers only for now -- passing and lane changes come later.
• A warning before every steep grade. Any climb or descent of three percent or more that runs for at least three quarters of a mile is now called out before you reach it, with how steep it is, how far it runs, and -- going down -- what to do about it before it starts. In a manual that is picking your gear and setting the engine brake; in an automatic it is setting the engine brake and braking down to speed, which is what puts the transmission in a lower gear for you. Short dips stay quiet, so on a mountain route you hear the hills that matter and nothing else. Terse speech does not get these announcements at all -- press G whenever you want the grade instead. The advisory is there so you can decide before the hill starts: when in doubt, take manual control of the speed rather than leaving it to cruise.
• A new song on the country stations. "Dust on the Highway" opens on a lone slide guitar over a rumbling bass, the drums lock in, and organ and harmonica trade fills through a gritty lead-guitar solo before the band slams back in for the finish. Three and a half minutes with no vocals, so it plays under the road without talking over it. You will hear it on The Rawhide out of Dallas, Big Wheel Country out of Nashville, Prairie Line out of Kansas City, and Big Sky Country out of Billings.
• Home terminal picker. A new career now asks where it should begin: after name entry, a fully spoken menu lists every city labeled by region ("Atlanta, the South"), with the usual arrow, Home/End, and first-letter navigation plus F1 help. Defaults to Chicago; Escape returns to name entry with the typed name intact. Existing profiles are untouched.
• A real interstate network. The map grows from 21 cities and 27 legs to 59 cities and 106 legs along real corridors (I-95, I-90, I-80, I-75, I-70, I-65, I-40, I-35, I-10, I-5, and more), so neighboring cities sit roughly 100-250 miles apart. Every new city has real coordinates for the live-weather feature, a weather region, and freight locations with regional identity: produce out of the Central Valley, autos around Detroit, electronics at the container ports, grain and livestock across the plains, machinery in the rust belt. Boston and Seattle are no longer dead ends; no city has fewer than two highways.
• Career-arc job generation. Rookie boards (levels 1-2) offer short regional work: mostly single-leg hops to neighboring cities, capped around 280-340 miles, with destinations weighted toward nearby cities so freight follows plausible lanes. The distance cap grows with level and cross-country hauls (600+ miles) unlock around level 4-5 as a dedicated long-haul slot on the board. A flat hookup fee keeps short early runs profitable after fuel.
• Mid-trip save and resume. "Save and quit to main menu" while driving now snapshots the delivery — job, route, position on the route, clock, speeding strikes, and trip damage baseline — into the profile. Continue (and Load driver) resume the drive right where you left off, parked with the engine off, with a spoken recap of cargo, destination, remaining miles, and hours used. Construction and traffic zones reappear in the same places thanks to a persisted trip seed, and stops or cities already passed are not re-announced. The Load driver list shows mid-delivery profiles as "on the road to ".
• Smoother truck engine audio. Engine sound now follows RPM more naturally, with smoother transitions as you accelerate, shift, and settle into highway speed.
• Garage upgrades (Garage → Upgrades), money-gated and saved on the profile: engine tune (+10% torque per tier, two tiers), aerodynamic kit (−12% drag), long-range tank (+50 gallons), and reinforced brakes (fade onset pushed 150 degrees hotter). Upgrades feed straight into the driving physics.
• A second truck: the heavy hauler (Garage → Trucks) — a quarter more torque and a 200-gallon tank, but blunter aerodynamics and a thirstier engine. Buy it once, then switch between owned trucks at any garage.
• Freight market: every cargo class carries a pay multiplier (0.8–1.3) that drifts each in-game day on a seeded random walk persisted in the profile. Job descriptions call out tight and loose markets, and the job board opens with a spoken market watch headline.
• Real-world weather (Settings → Weather source): live current conditions for each city from the free Open-Meteo API (no key required). WMO weather codes map onto the game's conditions, including strong-wind promotion. Fetches run in background threads with a 15-minute cache; offline or on any failure the simulated weather takes over seamlessly.
• City coordinates in the world data.
• With real weather enabled, route planning's W key speaks live conditions for the cities along the route, and the V key while driving reports "live conditions" for the city you are heading toward.
• Career mode: jobs, route planning, deliveries, money, experience levels, reputation, and cargo endorsements (refrigerated at level 2, high-value at level 4).
• Tuned Class 8 truck physics: ten-speed transmission (manual with clutch or automatic), torque curve, grades, traction limits, stalling, brake fade, engine braking, and realistic fuel economy (~6 mpg loaded).
• 21-city, 27-leg interstate network with Dijkstra route finding and multiple route options per job.
• Dynamic regional weather (eight conditions) affecting grip, drag, and safe speed, with forecasts and thunder.
• Trip events: construction and traffic zones, road hazards with reaction windows, rest stop refueling, out-of-fuel roadside rescue, speeding fines.
• Screen reader output through Prism (prismatoid): NVDA, JAWS, SAPI, VoiceOver, Speech Dispatcher, and more, with silent fallback.
• Fully synthesized CC0 sound library (43 effects) and three original music tracks, all reproducible from tools/generate_audio.py.
• RPM-crossfaded engine audio, speed-tracking road noise, weather ambience.
• Accessible UI: spoken menus with wrap-around and first-letter navigation, contextual F1 help, accessible text entry, three speech verbosity levels, imperial/metric units, and a visible text mirror of all speech.
• First-drive tutorial, six-page in-game manual.
• Atomic JSON saves with multiple driver profiles.
• Packaged builds for Windows and Linux.

Changed

• "Drivers board" is now "Drivers on duty". The Online menu and the pause menu both used to call it the drivers board, and the screen itself said Drivers online. Three names for one thing meant hearing it fresh each time. It is Drivers on duty everywhere now, including on the website, and "board" is left to mean the dispatch board, where your work comes from.
• Career 1.9 snapshot updates look for 1.9 prerelease builds, not public developer snapshots. Version 1.9 copies set to Update channel: developer snapshots download prerelease builds with dated tags such as 1.9-tester-20260829, spoken as "1 point 9 tester, August 29, 2026." They ignore public 1.8 developer snapshots, and 1.8 builds ignore the tester tags.
• From-source Career 1.9 builds no longer need Git LFS. sounds.pak is a regular git file on feat/career-1.9. music.pak is still fetched at package time, not cloned.
• Detention, lumpers, washouts, and tolls now hit an owner-operator's wallet. Those dollars used to be spoken and never move. They come off this settlement for owner-ops: detention pays you, and the rest charges you. A company driver still hears the ledger, but it is billed to the carrier -- the game does not promise a personal check that is not coming.
• Dispatched loads stay at or under 80,000 pounds. Tractor, trailer, and cargo against the federal cap. Fuel is not counted. An overweight truck is red-lighted at a transponder scale instead of rolling the bypass dice.
• Relaxed hours of service keep the same 11-hour drive, 14-hour window, and 30-minute break as realistic. Fines and inspection odds are lighter. The clock is not 13.75 hours.
• A scale wave-through after you pull in takes a couple of minutes, not fifteen. Fifteen is the inspection lane. A missed 30-minute break is thirty minutes out of service on the shoulder, not a ten-hour reset. Drive or duty still takes the ten hours.
• Standard pacing no longer multiplies roadside chatter. Town names, exits, curves, scales, work zones, and lane-count changes still speak once per place, the same at twenty-times speed as at Real time. CB chatter, weather color, and roadside flavor now spend a sitting-time budget, so a faster clock does not mean twenty times the pokes. Night, fuel, and hours of service still run on drive time. Real time stays a choice; Standard remains the sitting default.
• The truck says what kind of road you are turning onto. On the local drive at each end of a run, a turn onto a street the map has no name for used to be announced as "unnamed public road", every time, and that told you nothing about what you were turning onto. It now says what the road actually is: "a service road" for a yard road, delivery lane or parking aisle, and "a side street" for a small residential street. Roughly one arrival in eight has at least one of these turns. How fast you take them has not changed.
• A slow station is no longer written off as dead. The radio now waits thirty seconds for a station to answer instead of eight, and a station that does not come up on the first try gets one more connect on the spot, with "is slow to answer, trying again" spoken, before the radio hands over to the next station. Darren Duff radio and other small stations were being dropped while they were still answering. The cost: a station that really is gone stays quiet a little longer before the handover.
• Every exit now asks for its own ramp speed, and you may leave the highway at road speed. Taking an exit used to mean the same thing everywhere: be under forty-five at the gore, with adaptive cruise easing to forty, whether the ramp fed a stop sign off a fifty-five or carried you straight onto another interstate at seventy. Now each exit names the speed its ramp is really built for -- about seventy percent of the road's limit for a ramp onto an ordinary street, about eighty-five for a connector onto another freeway -- and that is the number you hear in "slow to" and "stay under", in the safe-speed reading, and in what adaptive cruise eases to at the ramp. The gore itself accepts road speed: the deceleration lane is there so you leave at highway speed and slow down inside it, and a truck that did exactly that on a downgrade no longer hears that it was going too fast and missed its exit. Route-transition assistance and exit speed assistance slow you to the ramp's own number along the ramp instead.
• A line cut off by urgent warnings finishes once -- it no longer repeats after every one of them. When something urgent interrupted the truck mid-sentence, the cut line came back so it could finish; but a chain of warnings replayed it after each one, so "Signal for the scale exit" could speak five times through a trooper escalation, even after the scale was behind you. It now comes back exactly once - and only while it is still true: an instruction whose moment has passed, or a damage total the truck has already left behind, stays quiet instead of replaying stale. The weigh-in-motion verdict speaks once, and a green transponder truck's scale announcement no longer tells you to signal for an exit you need no part of. This was the known repeat issue in the 21 August build note.
• Owner-operators can see the weigh station transponder before they can afford it. Business status only listed the transponder subscription once you already had the signup fee in the bank, so a lease operator saving toward it had no way to know it existed. The row is always there now: it reads as locked until you can afford it, and choosing it says what it is still waiting on. Company drivers are unaffected -- their carrier issues one free at career level 4.
• Speech about the truck's own automation always arrives now. Lines like an assist taking or releasing the pedals, the speed keeper changing what it holds, "Jake off", the gear direction you just selected, and where you landed after a lane change could be silently dropped when the speech channel was busy. Twenty-seven of them now wait their turn instead of vanishing, so the truck never changes who is driving without saying so.
• Slow vehicles on the highway are real traffic now, not a scripted scare. The old "a slow vehicle ahead -- dodge or brake!" hazard could fire anywhere with nothing actually there; it is gone. A slow vehicle you catch up to is now always a real one from the traffic around you, spoken with its type, gap, and actual speed. And vehicles that merge in from a ramp or brake for a moment now build back up to road speed the way real drivers do, instead of trundling along under the limit forever -- no more semis crawling down the interstate just to be slow.
• How much company you have on the road comes from the real road now. How many vehicles you meet used to be a rough guess -- mostly whether the leg passed near a town. It now comes from how many vehicles the road actually carries each day, spread across the hours the way real traffic is. A quiet rural highway at three in the morning is genuinely empty; the same road at five in the afternoon is not, and a busy corridor is busier than a quiet one at the same hour. The busiest roads still hit a ceiling on how much traffic can be around you at once, so a packed city freeway will not feel as packed as it really is.
• The driving mode row offers Relaxed and Standard; Realistic has been retired. It was the fastest setting on the row, not the truest to life: real driving runs at one times, and Realistic ran the game clock at forty, so the one choice that promised a real day at the wheel gave you the furthest thing from it. Standard is now the quickest pacing offered, at twenty times. If your save was set to Realistic you are on Standard, your game clock runs at half the speed it did, and a driving day takes twice the real time -- the row tells you so the next few times you open it, because nothing else would.
• The speed keeper stops promising a speed the road will not let you reach. Turning it on approaching a facility, it would say it was holding 25 while the truck crawled along nearer 14, and no amount of waiting fixed it. The gate area at the end of an approach is meant to be a slow zone for the last stretch before the yard, but it was measured as a fixed half mile back from the gate -- and a quarter of all approaches are shorter than that, so the slow zone covered the entire drive in and quietly held you to 15 the whole way, while the streets you were actually on still said 25. The gate zone is now the last street of the approach, which is what a gate is. Approaches longer than that are unaffected.
• No more stop signs where one interstate meets another. Coming off a ramp onto another interstate, you could be told to stop at a stop sign or wait at a light. That does not happen on a real road: where two freeways meet, the ramp simply merges. Nearly three thousand exits in the game were affected, because the game was guessing at what waits at the end of every ramp rather than looking at where the ramp goes. It now checks: if the ramp takes you onto another interstate, you merge. Ramps onto ordinary roads are unchanged, and a rural one can still end at a stop sign, because that is what those really do.
• Your career readout says how much experience the next level needs. It told you your level, your experience total, and which rank came next, but never the gap between them -- so the one thing you actually want to know, how much further, was the one thing missing. It now says "two hundred more to level four" right after the level. At the top of the ladder it does not promise a level that is not there. Asked for by Brandon.
• You can now choose a tone for the lane guide, if the road is too quiet to follow. When you drift, the road you are already hearing leans toward the side you need to steer, and goes quiet when you are straight. That is still what happens by default, and most drivers should leave it alone. But on some setups the road sits too far under the engine to tell which side it went to, which makes the whole cue useless. A new row in Audio settings, "Lane guide sound", switches it to a soft note instead -- same timing, same panning, same silence when you are straight, just something you can actually hear. It is off unless you turn it on, and it is in Learn game sounds as "Lane guide tone". Thanks to Darren, who reported the problem and sent in the sound this is built from.
• The route key stops repeating the turn you were just given. On city streets the truck calls each turn as it comes, and pressing R then read the same turn back to you a second time, in your screen reader's voice, right behind the one you had just heard. R now answers where you are and how far to the gate, and leaves the turns to the guidance -- which is what it already did out on the highway.
• Shift+R is gone. It read out the next listed highway exit, which is reference material the drive never asks you to do anything about. The next exit is still listed on the status screen, where you can read it when you want it. Plain R now answers the same thing whether or not you are holding Shift, so catching the Shift key by accident no longer gives you silence. On a controller, the right bumper with D-pad up answers route status too, for the same reason.
• The police marker stops turning the radio down when you asked it not to. With "game sounds step back for speech" switched off, passing a patrol still dropped the radio for a moment to make room for the marker tone. That setting is how you say you do not want the game moving your audio around, and it now covers this too. The marker still sounds at full volume -- it just no longer makes a hole first. If you listen to the police scanner stations and want the marker to stand out from them, turning the setting on gives you the old behaviour back.
• Confirmations no longer play the "you got past it" sound. At the quieter settings a confirmation is replaced by a short sound instead of words, and the sound being used was the one that means you cleared a hazard. So the truck could announce it was braking for a hazard by playing the sound for having got past one, while the hazard was still in front of you. Confirmations now have their own short note, and it is in Learn game sounds as "Confirmation note".
• On a one-lane road the warning says to brake again. At the quieter settings a hazard you cannot go around had been reduced to just naming the thing -- "brake lights right ahead" -- on the reasoning that the warning tone already means brake. In practice that reads as an invitation to change lanes, and on a one-lane road there is nowhere to go. The word "Brake" is back for exactly that case. Where a lane really is open you still get "change lanes or brake", and where nothing can be done about the hazard at all the wording is unchanged.
• Hairpins that were not really there are gone. The map's curve data was built by measuring the shape of real roads, and in about one place in fifty the measurement produced a bend that cannot exist: a turn sharper than the piece of road it sits on, or a left and a right meeting at a single point with no straight between them. On the road you heard a hairpin called, felt the truck fight a corner, and saw nothing in the terrain to explain it -- Josh hit one on US-285 north of Santa Fe, a 25 mile an hour hairpin called on a road posted 35. Those records are now thrown out when the map loads. Real switchbacks are untouched: a genuine reversal has road between the two halves, and that is exactly what the check looks for.
• Real-world traffic reports now say they are real-world traffic reports. With Traffic source set to real time, the game reads out crashes and closures from each state's own traffic service. Those describe the real road today, and the game does not act on them -- so being told "traffic alert: closed in both directions" and then driving the road with nothing in the way was the game claiming something it never meant. They are now spoken as a live road report, which is what they are: news from outside the cab, like a radio bulletin, about a road you may or may not be near. The road under your wheels is still the game's own. We looked at making the closure real and decided against it -- a real closure reported today should not be able to make a route you already accepted impassable halfway through it.
• The semis out there are governed now, so you can actually get around one. Every vehicle on the road took its speed from the posted limit, which is right for cars but wrong for a truck: a semi would cruise at seventy five on a seventy road, and in the states that hold trucks to a lower limit than cars it would run sixty five past you while you were legally pinned at fifty five. Passing one took forever because there was barely anything to pass, and sometimes nothing at all. Heavy trucks now run governed, the way real fleets run them -- most are set around sixty five, and they vary a little from one another, so you will see one slowly reeling in another the way you do out on the road. Cars are unchanged: they still go by at the speed their own limit allows, which is exactly what you should hear when your rig is held below it.
• Less talking on the way down to a stop sign or a light. The stop bar counts itself down out loud four times on the way in, and the last two of those land inside the range where the bar's own tick is already speeding up under you -- the same distance told twice, once in words and once in sound. On the standard setting you now get two calls instead of four -- the ones further out, that the tick cannot make. On quiet you get two as well, but different ones: the far call, and then one right where the tick starts, so the words hand you over to the beeps rather than just stopping. Both are now bare distances -- "one thousand feet", not "one thousand feet to stop bar, speed limit twenty five". By the time they land you have already been told this is a bar and what the limit is, so saying either again is a re-read.
• Connecting your orinks.net account now turns your public profile and cloud backup on. Connecting used to switch nothing on: profile sharing and cloud backup each needed their own separate yes afterwards, so drivers who connected and drove away found a public profile that said "no career statistics yet" and stayed that way. It said that because those statistics are read out of your cloud backup, and there was no backup. Connecting now starts both, so your profile fills in from your first delivery. The game says so before you connect, in the first-run offer, on the setup screen, and in "Hear what gets shared" -- and each one is still a single item on the Online menu whenever you want it off. If you are already connected, nothing changes: whatever you chose stays exactly as you left it.
• Owner-operators now start with a brand-new truck. Starting as an owner-operator used to hand you a tractor that was already four percent damaged and two thirds full of fuel, which read like something handed down to you rather than something you had just bought. You are buying in, so you are buying new: a full tank, no damage, and nothing worn. This start is still the hardest way to begin -- fuel, repairs, reserves and settlement fees all come out of your own cash, and your working capital is thin -- but the truck under you is yours and it is new.
• Driving through the barrels in a construction zone now costs you. Riding a closed lane until you plough through the cones used to cost only truck damage. It is now a fine and a serious mark on your safety record, the way running a construction zone really is. You are charged once for a given zone no matter how many barrels you take out, and you are never charged when the road left you no open lane to move into.
• Fines across the board now match what they cost a real trucker. Nearly every penalty in the game was a fraction of the real thing. Driving with unsafe equipment goes from 900 dollars to 2,300, running an open scale from 750 to 1,800, following too close from 250 to 600, and improper lane use from 175 to 500. Chain law, lights, shoulder parking and failure to stop all rise too. Speeding was already set against real schedules and has not changed.
• Two things now make a fine bigger. Any fine you earn inside a construction zone is doubled, the way most states really do double them, and the taper counts as inside because that is where the signs stand. Every prior citation in your career also raises the next one, which used to apply only to speeding. The two stack on top of each other, so a second run past an open scale in roadwork is 5,400 dollars. Both stop climbing after the third citation, and no single fine can ever cost you the truck on its own. When a fine has been doubled, you are told why, and every spoken fine now says the amount actually taken from you rather than the base.
• You never pay a fine into a hole. Worth saying plainly alongside the bigger numbers above, because it has always been true and is easy to miss: if you cannot cover a fine, it becomes a balance you owe rather than money you do not have. Only a quarter of each settlement goes to paying that balance down, so three quarters still reaches you and you can keep working. The balance cannot grow past a ceiling, and you are warned out loud well before you get near one. A run of bad luck costs you time and earnings; it does not strand you.
• New careers now really do start on the Realistic preset. The settings row has said Realistic for a long time, but lane keeping sat outside the presets, so the truck was quietly holding your lane and taking your exits the whole time. A fresh install now matches the label: you hold the lane yourself, and your destination exit needs your signal and your exit lane like every other exit. If you would rather the truck did that part, Driving assistance settings has the other two presets and the Lane keeping row. Nothing changes for an existing career -- your saved setting carries over exactly as it was.
• The steering setting now says what the truck actually does. Lane drift is now called Lane keeping, and its values changed from off, light, and realistic to full, partial, and off. The old names were the wrong way round: what used to be called off was the truck holding the lane for you and taking your exits, including your destination exit. Your setting carried over to the value that behaves exactly the same, so nothing about your driving changed, and the row explains the rename the first few times you visit it. Lane keeping now also follows the driving assistance presets, so the preset row can no longer describe less automation than you really have. With it on full, the truck says so the first time it sets an exit lane for you and the first time it takes your destination exit.
• The owner-operator start no longer skips the career. It used to open at level eighteen with thirty-five deliveries and forty-two thousand miles already behind you -- most of the thirty-level career handed over before you had driven a foot, and a history that never happened showing on your public profile. Now it starts where every career starts, at level one. What the choice actually gives you is the hard part: your own tractor, your own working capital, and every operating cost coming out of your pocket instead of the carrier's. It changes who pays, not how far along you are.
• Three new keys answer one hours question each. C used to read the clock, the deadline, and your whole hours-of-service position in one long breath. Now Alt A says how long you have been at the wheel this shift, Alt S says when your break is due, and Alt D says how much driving time and duty window you have left. Left to right, they follow the shape of a shift, and each starts with a different word so you always know which one you pressed. C still works and still opens the same way; it now ends with just the limit that matters next, and it reminds you about the new keys the first three times you press it. On a controller, the clock button still reads the full report.
• Street corners now ask you to slow down for them. The approach names the turn, the street, the distance, and the speed to be under, and arriving too fast means you go by it: the game takes you to the next safe turnaround and loops you back, with the clock running. Miss the same corner twice, or three anywhere on a run, and the turn is made for you so no route can strand you. Highway junctions are unchanged.
• The road under the truck now leans into turns and ramps. The guiding road sound went quiet during every corner and every exit ramp -- exactly when you most need to hear where the road is going. It now follows you through them.
• The radio dial moved to Page Down and Page Up. Page Down tunes to the next station and Page Up to the previous, with Control still jumping a whole category. The old semicolon and apostrophe keys keep working as a second option, so nothing you know breaks. The radio help pages and the manual now name the right keys everywhere.
• Test builds use a staging server for online services. While 1.9 is in testing, the drivers board, profile sharing, and cloud backup talk to a separate staging copy of orinks.net with its own accounts and data. Connect a fresh account there to help test; nothing you do on staging touches your real orinks.net driver, and staging careers and backups will not carry over when 1.9 releases.
• Careers from earlier versions stay in their own era. Version 1.9 rebalances the whole career -- pay, trucks, levels -- so every driver starts fresh. A career made in Freight Fate 1.8 or earlier still shows in your career list, clearly labeled, and picking it explains what changed and offers a new career instead; the old save is never touched, never deleted, and still works in Freight Fate 1.8. Cloud backups from earlier versions stay safe in your account the same way, restorable by the version that made them. Careers you started on 1.9 test builds carry on unaffected.
• Every Freight Fate music station now plays everywhere. The Rawhide, Big Wheel Country, The Grind, The Delta, and the rest of the game's own stations no longer fade out past their home cities. They sit together with Roadhouse and Night Line in the Freight Fate stations category on the dial, and they play anywhere on the map, in streamer-safe mode, with real streams off -- every player can hear the game's music.
• Turn signals play a clear tone instead of a soft click. The blinker, the exit signal, and the pull-over signal now mark themselves with a clean indicator tone panned to the side you are signaling -- the sound a modern cab actually makes -- so the cue carries even for players who could not hear the old relay click.
• Truck status now explains whose truck you are in. Company drivers hear which carrier fleet their tractor comes from and what it is good at. Junior drivers also hear that they slip-seat: dispatch matches one of the yard's spare tractors to each load, and every spare keeps its own fuel and wear between draws, so a fresh truck after a turn is the yard handing you a different unit, not your wear disappearing. The level 4 and level 9 rank announcements now say the same in plain words, including that a dedicated seat of your own comes with seniority.
• The driving school steps out of this release to finish training. The Driving school item leaves the terminal menu for now: the lessons are not complete, and this release locks its features down. The school returns finished in the next major version.
• The radio dial moved to semicolon and apostrophe. The brackets used to tune it; they now switch categories in the new message review, so the dial sits on the two keys just right of the home row instead. Semicolon walks down the dial, apostrophe walks up, and holding Ctrl with either still leaps a whole category. M still turns the radio on and off and Y still reads what is playing.
• Comma and period review your messages while driving. They still repeat and step through recent speech everywhere else in the game. From the cab they now walk the message log instead, which is the same gesture doing a fuller job: the lines are kept by category and you can copy one out.
• The R key now answers just "where am I". Two short sentences: how far along you are and how far is left, then the road you are on with its direction, the state you are in, and the city it is taking you toward. If you have planned a stop, the distance counts down to that stop instead of the destination, so R tells you how far to the place you are actually driving at. The nearest named place, the grade, the zone, and the next maneuver are gone from it, because each of those already has its own key or lives in the Tab status menu. U still reads what is coming up, and Shift R still reads the next exit.
• Shorter driving readouts that fit a braille display. The clock, route, weather, and fuel reports now put the answer in the first few words, so a one-line braille display shows what matters without panning. The C key leads with the time and whether you are on schedule instead of burying the verdict at the end, and on the terse speech setting it skips the calendar, the appointment restatement, and the stop-planning advice, all of which the Tab status menu still carries.
• Speech verbosity is now a simple choice between terse and normal. The chatty level never said anything normal did not; it only repeated your speed a little more often. If you had chatty selected, the game now uses normal, and everything you heard before is still there.
• Rest stops no longer let you sleep twice for nothing. When you are already fully rested at a rest stop, choosing a sleep option now warns you that it would only move the clock and your deadline forward, and asks you to press Enter again to confirm. This is the same safeguard the terminal bunk room already had.
• Walking away from a parked truck now takes you off the drivers board. If your truck sits stopped with nothing changing for half an hour, you leave the public board just as if you had paused the game, and the board stops calling you a driver who is on duty. The moment anything changes, like rolling again or pulling into a stop, you are back on the board within seconds. Deadhead drives also now say how far along they are, on the board and in Discord, so a long empty run never looks like a parked truck.
• The streets into town speak their real speed limit now. Heading in to a customer or a truck stop, the posted limit you hear on each approach street comes from the real road -- an arterial posted 35 or 45 no longer reads as a blanket 25 for miles. Where a street's limit isn't on record the sensible default stays, and the slow crawl right at the gate is unchanged.
• Gear changes are quicker, like a modern automated box. Power upshifts now take a quarter second in the low gears and half a second at the top, instead of dragging toward a full second. Downshifts keep their deliberate rev-matched pace -- that slower beat is real, and it is also what keeps the engine brake steady on a slick descent.
• The game is about a third smaller to download. The music now uses a newer, more efficient audio format, cutting the download from roughly 282 to 191 megabytes without changing how anything sounds -- welcome news on a slow or metered connection. Fifteen tracks were rebuilt from their original studio recordings along the way, so those should sound a shade cleaner than before.
• Dispatch stops handing you the same run over and over. Assigned dispatch now remembers your last few delivered routes and leads with a load to somewhere you have not just been, whenever the board has one. Repeats can still happen when the board is small, but the days of bouncing between the same two cities forever are over.
• Kilometer mode stays kilometers everywhere. With units set to kilometers, the dispatch board, route selection, exit signals, GPS and deadhead announcements, city-service errands, settlement distance, the radio station list, and the chain-speed and lane-change advice all still spoke miles here and there. Every spoken distance and speed now follows your units setting, and one mile is finally "1 mile", not "1 miles". Thanks to the forum for the report.
• The player manual caught up with the alpha. New sections cover mountain driving (the engine brake, gearing down, brake heat and fade) and winter driving (winter tires, snow chains, chain laws), and the manual now documents the driving school, truck-stop meals and showers, lane changes and hazard dodges, wear meters, roadside chatter switches, the overspeed warning setting, and every new key.
• Ramp endings are announced early, and play out in real time. When you signal for an exit, the announcement now says how the ramp ends -- "The ramp ends at a stop sign" -- while there is still a mile of highway to plan your braking on, and the U upcoming readout carries the same warning. And from the moment you are on a ramp that ends in a light or a sign, the game clock drops to real time until you are through the intersection: no more hearing about a stop sign two seconds before blowing past it because the clock was compressed.
• Latch a pedal and give your hands a rest. Tap the accelerator or brake, then press again and hold for half a second: a click and a spoken confirmation latch the pedal so it stays applied without holding the key, like the old hand-throttle knob in a real cab. Press the same key once to take the pedal back, or touch the opposite pedal and it lets go instantly. Emergency braking, hazards, and the overspeed alarm always outrank a latched pedal and release it with a spoken note. Made for long pulls, steady downhill braking, and hands that tire of holding keys; turn it off any time under Settings, Driving assistance, Latching pedals.
• The repeat key now walks back through recent speech. Comma still re-reads the last spoken line anywhere in the game, and pressing it again within a few seconds now steps back through the last twenty lines, one per press, from menus and driving events alike. Each older line starts with how far back it is, like "2 back", and the moment anything new speaks, the key returns to the newest line. A missed warning buried under two announcements is never gone anymore.
• One key now answers "how fast should I be going?" Press D while driving to hear a single safe-speed number for right now, sitting right next to the S posted-limit key. Slick weather and an upcoming exit ramp are already baked into the number, never into the sentence, so the answer is short enough to catch at speed and free to repeat.
• Career stats now list your endorsements. The endorsements you hold, earned by rank or paid for as a course, used to be announced only once, the moment you gained them. The Career stats screen now has an Endorsements line you can review any time, so you always know whether that refrigerated or heavy-machinery load on the board is yours to take.
• The driving school opens its doors. A new Driving school item at the terminal offers spoken lessons on a flat, empty practice road where nothing counts: no money spent, no wear, no fuel burned, no hours used. An instructor walks you through each step and waits for you to do it. The first lesson covers rolling basics, from starting the engine and releasing the parking brake to a smooth stop from thirty. More lessons will follow; use it to learn the controls or just to practice without risking your career.
• Real streets reach the whole map now. The street and facility data sweep re-ran over all six hundred twenty-three cities: sixty percent of home-terminal yards now start every load with spoken turn-by-turn directions on named local streets, up from a small Midwest batch, and nearly every local approach in the country names its real road.
• Hundreds more facilities now start and end on real city streets. Short yard-to-facility drives used to skip their street route and fall back to one straight access road; now any facility whose real path has a street chain under five miles uses it, so you hear real road names and turns at hundreds more pickup and dropoff sites across the country. Deadheads and final approaches at hundreds more warehouses, cross-docks, and company yards -- including the Evansville starter yard every new company driver leaves first -- speak real turn-by-turn directions on named local streets.
• Driving speech is now a ladder you pick, not a single terse switch. The old setting only made each message shorter, which is why a quiet drive still talked constantly -- it never said fewer things. Driving speech, in the Speech settings, now has three settings. Standard speaks every confirmation and status readout in words, says a driving tip once per leg of your route rather than every time, and repeats a status readout only when it changes. Quiet turns tips, confirmations and status readouts into a short sound instead of a sentence, and keeps the safety calls, what things cost, and route instructions as words. Urgent only goes further: the heads-up lines become a short sound too -- a bend coming, a town coming up -- leaving the safety calls, what things cost, and the directions you cannot take back, which are the turn itself, the exit, and the stop you are pulling into. Everything either of them stops saying is still in the message log, and the status keys still answer for it. Billboards, place names, and landmarks are not part of this ladder and keep their own switches, so you can drive a quiet cab through a talkative countryside. If you were playing on terse you are now on Quiet, and normal lands on Standard.
• Truck status and garage refueling respect the active truck's actual tank size instead of assuming 150 gallons.
• Save format version is now 2 (older saves load fine; new fields get defaults).

Fixed

• Real time driving no longer leaves the road empty for minutes at a time. When its nearby traffic bubble is completely empty, the road now converts its normal route volume and time-of-day density into a real-time arrival interval, then lets a modeled vehicle enter at the existing spoken-warning distance in your lane, where the normal traffic warning and status readout can identify it. Normal vehicle and speed rules still apply.
• Freight Fate builds on a Mac again. Building from source on macOS stopped part way through in two places: the tool that downloads the audio library refused to run on a Mac at all, and the build could not find the windowing library even with it installed. Both are fixed for Apple silicon and Intel alike. Install SDL2 first with brew install sdl2 pkg-config, then the usual steps work. Thanks to the tester who tracked this down.
• Corridor billboards that were lying got pulled or moved. Wall Drug no longer plays in Montana, or on western Interstate 90 in Wyoming; the two boards stay on South Dakota and the Minnesota approach. The caverns sign that named Meramec now sits on Interstate 44 in Missouri, where those caverns actually are, instead of Interstate 40 in Arkansas. Dock of the Bay stays in California and no longer plays in Nevada. A handful of radio-memory tributes that were never paid boards -- Black Bear Road, Mexican Radio, Haynesville Woods, Ionia County, Cincinnati, Russell County, and a George Strait line that named Amarillo on the wrong road -- are gone. The roadside still has its corridor character; the signs just have to be true where you hear them.
• Route-transition assistance no longer rides the service brake down a routine ramp. It now eases off the throttle for the ramp speed instead of holding the brake and draining the air tanks toward the compressor cut-in or low-air warning. The gauge may still tick, and stopping at a sign or red light still uses the brakes for a real stop.
• The throttle key no longer latches. Holding the accelerator never catches a throttle latch -- no spoken "Throttle latched.", no catch click, and no cruise or speed-keeper line about a latched throttle. At a standstill that key is only for moving and for the hold that changes direction, so pumping the pedal to get out of reverse works with a normal hold. The brake can still latch; that setting is now Latching brake, on or off. Older three-way Latching pedals values carry over: anything that was on stays a latched brake, and off stays off.
• The weigh station's green and red lights can be heard again. The tone that tells you the scale has cleared you through, and the one that sends you into the inspection lane, had gone quiet: both sounds were missing from what shipped with the game, so the lights changed in silence and the only way to know the verdict was the spoken line. Both play at the scale again.
• The centered-lane chime now waits until the truck is actually centered. With lane keeping off, easing just inside the guidance wake line could play the confirmation while the truck was still drifting. Manual correction now gets one confirmation only after the truck is back near lane center.
• Traffic status now names the vehicle it is describing. When Freight Fate knows the traffic is a car, semi, box truck, service vehicle, or trooper, the Route screen and Driver Traffic app say that instead of a generic "lead vehicle" or the wrong kind of vehicle. Slow, Merging, and Brake lights match the spoken cues, with the vehicle, distance ahead, and speed separated by commas instead of saying "in your lane" or "moving."
• Acceleration-lane assistance now keeps pulling until cruise can take the truck safely. The speed keeper treated an on-ramp like a gentle steady-speed zone, so a loaded automatic could waste much of a 1,600-foot lane below full throttle and cruise would not take over until the pavement ended. The keeper now uses the truck's full real drivetrain while it builds speed, then hands to adaptive cruise at a traffic-relative threshold when that truck's load, grade, wear, and conditions make the threshold reachable. A genuinely slow truck still gets the truthful big-gap warning and real-time recovery; no speed or pavement is invented.
• A red light on the destination ramp no longer leaves the truck crawling after green. Destination approach assistance used to take the pedals before a ramp-end light, then mistake the light's full stop for the final gate crawl and hold two miles per hour for the rest of the approach. Route-transition assistance now handles the light first; after green you pull ahead normally, and destination assistance slows again only when the facility entrance is actually close.
• A slow loaded truck gets a safe highway handoff after an on-ramp. If a heavy load reaches the end of its acceleration lane well below traffic speed, Freight Fate keeps the speed assistance on the real-time clock until the truck is close enough to merge safely. The lane length is still the same road it announced; the game does not pretend that extra pavement is there.
• A start with no game sounds now tells you so. If Freight Fate cannot open the sound on your computer it still starts, the way it always has, and the voice still reads everything out. Until now nothing said that the engine, the traffic and the alerts were gone, so a silent drive was impossible to tell apart from a broken game. The main menu now says once, on the way in, that game sounds could not start and that you will hear the voice but no engine, traffic, or alert sounds.
• After you miss your destination exit, the game stops telling you to signal for an exit the truck is taking itself. With lane keeping on full the truck takes your destination exit for you. Miss it once, and the turnaround still said "press X when you are close enough to take it" -- so you were reaching for the key when the truck left the highway on its own, with nothing having said it would. The turnaround now says lane keeping is taking it and to hold the right lane and slow down, and the exit call on the way back round says so again. With lane keeping on partial or off, where the exit really is yours to take, it still asks you for the signal.
• The speed warning stays on after you miss your delivery exit. Reported by Tyler Rodick, who blew the exit at the Hattiesburg, Mississippi yard and then held eighty-nine miles an hour all the way round the loop-back without a word from the dash. Missing the delivery exit used to switch the warning off until you finally took the exit, so the one stretch where you most need to shed speed was the one stretch nothing warned you about -- and a trooper who saw it could still write you up for it. The warning now works the whole way, exactly as it does anywhere else on the road.
• Missing your delivery exit no longer sends you hunting for an exit that is not there. At the ramp the game used to tell you to stay on the highway and recover at the next safe exit. There is no next exit that gets you to the dock: you carry on to the end of the route, take the safe turnaround, and the delivery exit comes around again. That is what it says now, so the loop-back is something you are waiting for rather than something that happens after you have given up. Ordinary stops along the way are unchanged -- you really can pick one of those up from a later exit.
• Freight Fate's own stations keep playing while you are tuned away. Reported by Marie. Tuning back to Big Sky Country, or any of the other stations the game plays itself, used to start its song list over from the top, so the same song opened it every single time you came back. Each station now runs its own hours through the whole drive whether you are listening or not, so coming back finds it wherever it has got to: a different song, part way through, and sometimes the host talking. It has also been on the air a while before your drive starts, so the first time you tune in you arrive in the middle of a song the way you would on a real radio, and two stations never open on the same one. A host break, station ident, or advert always plays from its beginning rather than being cut into half way through. Your own playlists are untouched: they still resume on the track they left off on and always start it from the beginning.
• Receiver unloading no longer turns an on-time arrival into a late delivery. The appointment, pay, and on-time bonus now use the time the truck checked in at the receiver. Unloading still advances the clock, and the delivery summary names that later service time separately.
• Traffic stops crawling in front of you for a jam that is not there. A vehicle that had slowed for congestion kept doing it long after the congestion was behind it, and near enough for you to hear about it: it sat at under half the posted limit for mile after mile, and the warning said brake lights ahead without ever saying what for, because by then there was nothing to say. Once the traffic it was caught in is behind it, it is ordinary traffic again -- it comes back up to the speed of the road it is on, and the warning for it stops.
• "Descent control cannot hold this grade" is only said when it cannot. On a run of short dips at highway speed you could be told to get on the brakes three times in a minute while the truck was slowing hard, and press G a moment later to be told the road was level. Both things were happening at once: the warning went off the instant a dip began, before descent control had done anything about it, and by the time you heard it the dip was behind you. It now waits until the truck is genuinely getting away -- well over the speed descent control is working to, still gaining with the engine brake and the service brakes already in it, and staying that way rather than for a heartbeat at the top of a hill. On a real runaway you hear it exactly as before. It also asks the same question of the truck that the G key does, so the warning and the readout can no longer tell you two different things about the same piece of road.
• The engine brake waits for a hill that actually needs it now. It was coming on down every dip in the road -- one, two, three percent, the sort of grade you barely feel -- and holding on for miles at a stretch on hills the service brakes were never in any trouble on. Whether it belongs on a descent is not really a question about how steep the road is. It is whether the brakes can hold the hill without cooking, and that is the slope, the weight behind you and your speed, all three together. Loaded to eighty thousand pounds the brakes will hold anything up to about four percent all day and begin to lose it just past that; empty, they cope with nearly ten. So that is what the truck works out now, from the load you are actually carrying and the speed you are actually doing, instead of one flat number for every truck on every hill. On a shallow descent the engine brake stays out of it and the service brakes hold your speed exactly as they did -- sooner, if anything, because they no longer stand by waiting for an engine brake that is not coming -- and descent control still tells you the number it is holding. Once the engine brake is on for a real grade it stays on until the road is properly level again, so rolling country no longer makes it stutter on and off. Across the test hills it now runs a little under four minutes where it used to run more than eight, and none of that is on anything shallower than four percent. Nothing changes about the engine brake you work yourself: the stalk, the cylinder choices on 1, 2 and 3, and the automatic engine brake you arm with J all behave exactly as before, on any grade you like.
• The engine brake stops coming on where there is nothing to hold back. The engine brake exists to hold a loaded truck back on a hill going down. Two things had it running where it had no business. A bend that started on a dip and carried on onto the flat, or up the far side, kept the engine brake for the whole corner -- it was only ever let go when the corner ended, never when the hill under it did, so the truck was still being held back while it was trying to climb. And with the engine brake set to automatic on an automatic gearbox, it never went all the way off: it kept two cylinders cut for the rest of the drive, so every time the cruise eased off the throttle on level ground you heard it, and on a climb it pulled against a truck that was already losing the hill. It also worked to whatever speed you happened to be doing when you switched it on rather than the speed the cruise was set to, so setting the cruise higher had it fighting to drag the truck back down. Now it lets go the moment the hill runs out, and on a climb it comes off altogether so the truck can build speed instead. Measured on a bend out of a dip onto a four percent climb: ten seconds later the truck was doing 29 rather than 25. Everything it should still do is unchanged -- it holds a real descent, it comes on when you are genuinely running over your number on the flat, and switching it off by hand, picking cylinders with 1, 2 and 3, and touching the accelerator all work the same.
• Billboards now stand where the sign says they do. A sign naming a town used to be read anywhere on that interstate, so Interstate 40 across Tennessee advertised Oklahoma, "Jacksonville ahead" turned up in New England, and redwood country and the Appalachian hollers could be read in any state in the country. A sign that names a place now only appears near it: a town's sign starts about a hundred and fifty miles out on the road that reaches it, and a sign about a region only reads in that region. Roads that merely share a number with an interstate, like a US or state route ninety, no longer borrow that interstate's signs either. The everyday roadside is untouched -- the diners, the fireworks, the attorney, the church signs still turn up anywhere -- and every corridor kept all of its own signs.
• The speed keeper now holds the posted number up a hill, and says so when it cannot. With automatic speed control on, the keeper announced the number it was holding through a work zone, a heavy-traffic stretch, or the streets in to a facility, and then quietly lost it the moment the road tilted up. On a one percent rise a fifty-five held forty-nine; on two percent it held thirty-four; a forty-five zone on a three percent pull sank to twenty-seven, and a steep grade put every one of them down in the teens -- with nothing said. The same ceiling was why pulling out of a yard onto an acceleration lane took so long: the keeper said it was building to the road's speed and then never quite got there. It now uses as much of the throttle as the hill actually needs, so it sits on its number instead of settling wherever half a pedal happened to balance the climb, and a merge that used to stall out five miles an hour short arrives. Where the hill genuinely beats a loaded truck it now tells you, once, the way adaptive cruise already did: "Speed keeper is flat out and cannot make fifty-five miles per hour on this grade."
• On a road with no way past, the truck brakes sooner and harder. When a slower vehicle was ahead of you, the game said one thing and did another. On a single lane it told you to brake, because there was nowhere to go -- and then quietly gave you two and a half extra seconds anyway, the time a lane change takes, for a lane change the road did not have. The automatic brake waited out those seconds while you kept closing, so the driver with no way past ended up nearer the vehicle in front before anything happened than the driver who could simply go around. That is backwards, and it is fixed: whether there is a lane to take is now decided once, and the words and the truck both follow it. On a single lane the brake comes on sooner and holds the truck further back; where a lane is open, the time to make the move is still yours.
• Debris on a wide road can be gone around now, and the warning says so. A ladder, a mattress, spilled boxes, a shredded tarp -- anything lying in your lane -- used to be a nearly-full stop no matter how much road was beside you. Where there is an open lane you now hear "Change lanes or brake!" and you can simply move over. Where there is not, it is still a near stop, and the line afterwards no longer claims you eased around something on a road with nothing to ease into. Things that cover the whole road -- fog, ice, a crosswind, a deer, traffic stopped across the lanes -- are still brake-only, because no lane change answers those.
• The truck no longer brakes for a stop it does not have to make. The warning about a vehicle ahead used to budget your time as if you had to come nearly to a standstill for it, even though slowing to match its speed is what actually clears it. You were left holding a long, vague window in which nothing happened. The time you get is now measured against the slowing the situation really needs, so the response starts when it should.
• Traffic drives the road it is on, so far fewer slow vehicles are in your way. A car or truck out on the road took its speed from wherever it first appeared and then kept that number for good. A US route drops to thirty through every town it passes, so a car that appeared in one carried thirty out onto the sixty-five on the far side -- and where the road had only one lane, there was no way past it and nothing about the road explained why it was there. It also worked the other way: a car that appeared out on the highway held sixty-five through the next town. Everyone now speeds up and slows down with the road under them, the way they always should have. Driven over five thousand miles of real corridors, the times the road made you brake for a vehicle ahead have roughly halved, on one-lane roads and on wider ones alike -- and there is exactly as much traffic out there as before.
• A trooper stops fining you for a gap the assists are managing. If a speed assist had the throttle, it could close right up on traffic ahead -- the speed keeper holds the posted number and does not watch the vehicle in front at all -- and you got the ticket for it. In a work zone that is doubled, so it was 2,400 dollars for something no control of yours was driving. The road now only counts it against you if you are the one on the throttle.
• Construction warnings stop telling you to brake for something eight miles away. The advance warning opened with "brake now", which is the phrase the cab uses for debris in your lane, and then said the work was miles off. It now opens with the distance, like every other zone warning: "in eight miles, construction ahead." Everything else about it is unchanged, and the assists still ease at the taper rather than early.
• Brake lights ahead no longer make you stop dead. A slow vehicle in your lane was treated the same as a tyre carcass: the warning only counted as answered once you were down to a crawl, and with automatic braking on the truck did that for you whether you wanted it or not. On a long interstate run it could happen every couple of minutes, and since a loaded truck takes over a minute to get back to seventy, you never did -- which felt like cruise control giving up. A vehicle ahead now clears once you are down to ITS speed, which is what you would do anyway. Debris, animals and traffic that has actually stopped still ask for everything they always did.
• The upcoming readout stops saying "in 0 miles". U rounded every distance to a whole mile, so anything closer than half a mile came out as zero, and on a slow crawl into a yard it would sit on the same number for minutes while you closed on the thing. It reads a decimal now -- "facility gate in 0.4 miles" -- so the number moves as you do, which is most of what the key is for.
• No more "Limit." with nothing after it at a ramp end. On quiet speech, the traffic-light call at the end of a ramp read "Light at ramp end, green. Limit ." -- a sentence with a hole where the number should be. The game leaves the limit out on purpose when it cannot vouch for it, because a wrong number is worse than none; it was just still saying the word "limit" first. Now it says the limit when it has one and stops cleanly when it does not.
• Braking on a hill no longer lowers your cruise speed for the rest of the run. Touching the brake on a downgrade with descent control on was being taken as "this is my new cruise speed", permanently. It also stacked: 65 became 55 on one hill and 49 on the next, and once it was 49 there was nothing to climb back to, so the truck just stayed there on the flat and up the far side. Your set speed now survives the hill. The brake still caps your speed for as long as that grade lasts -- the cab says "descent control holding X for this grade" -- and when the road levels out you go back to the speed you actually set.
• Fewer needless slowdowns for interstate curves. The game worked out how fast a bend could be taken as though every road were flat. Real highway curves are banked, and the bank is a big part of what holds a truck in a curve -- ignoring it made ordinary interstate bends look sharper than they are, so the truck braked for curves built to be driven at speed. Curves are now read with the bank the road is actually built with, which roughly halves how often an interstate asks you to slow down. Town streets are unchanged: they genuinely are built flat.
• "Hairpin" now means a hairpin. The cab was calling a bend a hairpin whenever it advised 25 miles per hour or less, which caught a lot of road that is nothing of the kind -- tight little corners taken slowly, and in the worst cases bends that barely change direction at all. A hairpin is a switchback, where the road turns back on itself and you have to crawl it, and that is what the word means now. Of the bends previously called hairpins, well under half really were; the rest are announced as sharp bends, which is what they are. You will hear the word far less often, and when you do it will be worth slowing for.
• Curve assistance slows for the whole chain of bends, not just the first one. When two bends come one after the other, the cab warns you about both in a single breath -- "Curve left, a quarter mile. Advise 40. Then sharp left, advise 30." Curve speed assistance was only easing to the first number and letting the speed back up as soon as the first bend was behind, so it carried you into the second one ten miles an hour too fast, and that second bend never got a warning of its own because the first call was supposed to be it. It now holds the slowest speed in the chain until the last bend of it is behind you, which is the speed you were told.
• You can get past a box truck now. Box trucks were being run at the same governed speed as a loaded semi, which on a 65 road put them within about a mile an hour of you. Pulling into the left lane to get around one never finished the job: you sat level with it and it stayed exactly where it was. A box truck is not a tractor-trailer, and it no longer borrows one's speed limiter -- it runs slower than the heavy trucks now, the way it does on a real interstate, and you go by it.
• Closing the window asks first, instead of taking your drive with it. Alt F4, or the window's close button, used to shut the game down on the spot. Part way through a leg that quietly cost you the leg: you can only save at a stop, so the drive you were on was gone and your save still pointed at your last stop. Closing the window now raises the same yes or no question Escape does, starting on No, and when there is a drive in progress it says so before you answer. If you really do want out, pressing it a second time closes the game without asking again.
• Billboards and roadside signs read in full on quiet. Quiet shortens the roadside colour by keeping the name and dropping the words around it, which works for a river crossing or a park boundary -- the name is the whole point of those. A billboard is not a name. It is what the sign actually says, and the joke is usually the last line, so shortening one left you the setup without the punchline: "Meteor Crater is ahead, a hole in the desert nearly a mile wide" and never "It is bigger than it sounds. Much bigger." Billboards and the roadside signs you pass now read in full at every setting. If you find them too talkative, the billboards switch turns them off outright, which was always the better control than hearing half of each.
• Career stats now tells you what you are driving and what earns the next truck. The screen you go to when you want to know where you stand did not mention your truck at all. If the yard was holding better equipment back from you, that was said when dispatch handed you a tractor and when a level-up arrived without one -- both moments you had to be there for. Career stats now carries the tractor you are in and the fleet it belongs to, and either the reason the better iron is being kept from you and what gives it back, or the level that earns the next fleet.
• Canceling a planned stop gives you the road back straight away. Signal for an exit and the drive drops out of its usual pacing for the approach, so you have real time to set up the braking. Press the key again to call the stop off, though, and that slower pacing used to stay with you all the way to the exit you had just given up on -- it felt like the truck refusing to get back up to speed. Canceling means you are staying on the highway, and the drive picks its pace back up the moment you do.
• A curve call no longer comes back after the bend. When something urgent cut a curve call off mid-sentence, the game handed that call back so the road's warning was not lost to the interruption -- but it handed it back whether or not it was still true. Through one bend that could mean hearing the call, and the adaptive cruise clause with it, again after you had already braked, or after you were through the corner. A curve call now expires: it only comes back while the bend is still ahead of you and you are still carrying too much speed for it.
• The message review filter stays where you put it. Locking review to a single category made it much easier to navigate, but the choice was being thrown away roughly ten seconds after your last press -- so if you went back to driving for a moment, the next press quietly put you back to all messages. It felt random because it was a timer. Your choice now stands until you change it. It used to be cleared for a reason, mind: a filter left on events once hid a whole delivery settlement. So review now counts what the filter is keeping out -- pick a category and it tells you how many newer messages sit outside it, and it says so again when you reach the newest one the filter shows, instead of answering with silence.
• Texas billboards stay in Texas. A couple of the song tributes named a real place -- Lubbock, the West Texas cotton flats -- while sitting in the pool for signs that belong anywhere, so you could pass them in Maine. They have moved to the road they are about.
• A trooper stop no longer repeats its demand after you have pulled over. When an urgent line cuts something off mid sentence, the game hands that line back so it finishes. Two of the heaviest lines in the game could come back at the wrong moment: "lights and siren behind you, signal and brake to a stop on the shoulder" could arrive after you were already stopped with the officer at your window, and the final warning could threaten spike strips and felony charges over a stop you had already made. Both now only speak while the stop is still unresolved.
• The speed warning stops nagging once you have slowed down. Same cause: the over-the-limit warning could be handed back after you had already lifted off, telling you about a speed you were no longer doing and quoting a limit that by then belonged to road behind you.
• "Press Enter to continue into the facility" stops asking once you have pressed it. When an urgent line cuts off something the truck was part way through saying, the game hands that line back so it finishes. For the hold prompt at a dock that could arrive after you had already pressed the key and the dock menu was open, asking for something you had just done. It now only comes back while the key still does something. The prompt itself was only ever said once; the extra copies were the hand-back, which is capped at one in this build.
• Moving over to avoid something no longer drags it into your new lane. A hazard you can steer around is answered by being in a different lane from it. But the game was re-reading which lane the hazard was in every time anything else came up -- and it read the lane the TRUCK was in, so if a second piece of debris turned up while you were still moving over, the first one moved with you. You would be told to change lanes, do it, and be told to change lanes again, two or three times over. Doing what you were told was what brought the instruction back. A hazard now stays in the lane it was in.
• A dodge call no longer comes back after you are already clear. When an urgent warning cuts off something the truck was part-way through saying, the game hands that line back so it finishes. For a hazard call like "change lanes or brake, retread debris from a blown tire" that could arrive after you were past it, telling you to swerve around something that is no longer there. A hazard line now only comes back while the hazard is still live. If you noticed one of these repeating but found only a single copy in message review, that is not a second bug: review deliberately collapses a line repeated back to back, so pressing a status key twice does not make you step over a duplicate.
• A cut exit instruction no longer comes back after you have passed the exit. When an urgent warning cuts off something the truck was part-way through saying, the game hands that line back so it finishes. The exit instruction was not checking whether the exit was still there, so "move right for the exit lane" could arrive after the ramp was already behind you -- the same wrong-moment repeat that was fixed for the weigh station, in a place nobody had reported it yet. It now speaks only while the exit is still ahead of you.
• If the yard hands you a lesser truck than your level earned, it now tells you why, when it happens. Once you have your own truck, dispatch used to say nothing at all about it -- so a driver whose dispatch trust had quietly capped what the yard would hand over kept drawing a smaller rig every run with no explanation anywhere near the moment it happened. The reason was only ever on the dispatch trust screen, which you would have to already suspect the answer to go and read. Now taking a load tells you what your level had earned, what is holding it back, and the exact thing that gives it back to you. Drivers in good standing hear nothing, because there is nothing to explain.
• Pulling out of a warehouse or yard now gets you a real run-up to the highway. Leaving a facility used to hand you onto the highway at whatever the last corner left you doing, with no ramp to build speed on and, if you had automatic speed control armed, nothing driving for you when you got there. Three things were wrong at once. The game was treating the last stretch of street before the on-ramp as if it were the yard entrance and holding you to fifteen. There was no acceleration lane at all. And the pause that automatic speed control takes when you stop somewhere was never being lifted when you drove away, so it followed you out of the yard and refused to engage for the rest of the run. Now the fifteen sits at the entrance where it belongs, the on-ramp has a real acceleration lane whose length comes from the same tables real interchanges are built to, and the speed keeper drives that lane for you and builds toward the speed of the road you are joining. If you are still under the speed of traffic when the lane runs out, the truck says so and tells you to take a big gap -- because a loaded rig genuinely does merge slower than a car, and now the game is honest about it rather than pretending otherwise.
• A facility approach posts one speed limit, and changes it once, at the gate. Driving in to a warehouse or yard used to hear the speed limit change every few hundred feet -- fifteen, then twenty-five, then fifteen again -- all of it called "facility access road", with nothing under the wheels actually changing. Those numbers were never posted speeds: the map data guesses twenty-five where a street has a name and fifteen where it does not, and the game was reading that guess aloud as a sign. The access road now holds one limit for the whole run in, and the only change you hear is the fifteen at the gate itself, which is real.
• Live weather is ready when you start driving, and it never quietly hands your sky to simulated weather. The game now starts fetching real conditions while you are still parked at the terminal, so a drive begins on live weather instead of waiting for it to load. And when a weather check fails mid-drive -- a dropped connection, a moment of bad signal -- the game keeps the last real conditions, says they are last-known, and keeps trying. Simulated weather only ever appears when the game has had no connection at all since it started.
• The Online services switch no longer touches weather, traffic, or parking. Two testers turned on real-world weather and heard nothing but simulated skies because the Online services master switch was quietly standing it down. That switch now governs only the orinks.net and sharing services -- the drivers board, profile sharing, cloud backup, Mastodon, and Discord presence. Real-world weather, traffic, and parking follow their own toggles under Settings, and turning one on works no matter how the Online switch is set.
• No more phantom hairpins on the interstate. The dense road-geometry sweep had baked a few thousand impossible curves onto interstate mainline -- city-departure kinks and interchange corners recorded as if the highway itself bent that hard. At speed one could fire a bogus "Hairpin right, advise twenty", shove the truck toward the shoulder, and pin the clock to real time on a road that runs straight. Those records are now screened out on load. Real mountain interstates keep every genuine bend, and the sharp stuff on two-lane passes -- the Million Dollar Highway's switchbacks included -- is untouched.
• A dead radio stream no longer drops you to silence. When a real stream refuses to play, the radio now says which station went off the air, moves you to the next station in the same part of the dial, and keeps the dead stream off the dial for the rest of the session instead of letting you land on it again.
• Rest-stop sleep no longer turns into a dead end at the exit. Pressing T while rolling toward a sleep-capable stop now plans and names that exact stop, then tells you to press X before leaving the highway. A new optional, default-off stopping aid can finish the stop at the entrance after you take the selected exit; it never chooses or signals an exit for you. Missing or canceling the stop clears the aid and gives spoken recovery guidance.
• The stop bar's steady tone is calmer. The tone that means you are on top of the stop bar was high and sharp -- hard to sit through for the seconds it is meant to hold. It is now a much lower, steadier tone, easy on the ear while still carrying over the engine. It stays just as easy to tell from the ticks leading up to it: where those quicken, this one drops.
• The stop bar's steady tone always stops. The continuous tone that means you are on top of the stop bar could be left sounding for the rest of the drive: reach it creeping up to a red light, and once you crossed the bar the tone stayed on, straight through the menus, until the game was closed. It now ends the moment the bar is behind you, whether you waited out the red, crossed on the green, or stopped for a sign, and it goes quiet on its own if anything else ever gets in the way of ending it -- pausing or arriving silences it at once. The tone comes back only when the next stop bar is under your bumper. Rumble strip sound left playing when you paused on the strip is gone the same way.
• A damaged settings file no longer takes the game down with it. If your settings file was left half-written by a crash, or ended up holding something that is not a volume level where a volume level belongs, the game could refuse to start at all. Anything it cannot read as a level now falls back to that setting's normal value, and it says so in its log. A level you really did set is untouched -- turning something down to nothing still means nothing.
• The engine keeps one voice. When the game's sound file was older than the game itself, the engine could take part of its voice from the old file and part from the new one, crossfading between two different recordings as the revs climbed. The engine now takes every layer of its voice from the same place, so it sounds like one engine again.
• A bad sound file no longer costs you every sound. If the game's sound file is damaged -- a download that stopped short, a copy that did not finish -- the game used to go completely silent. Now it says so in its log and plays whatever sound it can still find, and a single unreadable sound inside the file costs only that one sound instead of all of them.
• Cruise no longer claims a hill has beaten it while it is winning. When a rising speed limit or a higher set speed put the target well above the truck, cruise flooring the pedal to catch up could be announced as losing the grade -- even as the truck accelerated. The call now waits for a real grade, ignores the moment of a gear change, and has to stay true for a few seconds before it speaks.
• The engine's voice is now longer than your memory. The deepest layer of the repeating-engine problem: each layer of the engine sound was a short recording whose rise and fall a careful ear could learn and anticipate. Every layer has been rebuilt three times longer from its own recording -- same voice, same working rhythm, but the fine texture never repeats, so there is no pattern left to learn.
• Public-radio stations that had gone silent play again. A sweep of every stream in the catalog turned up a batch that had drifted to stale addresses -- big public stations among them, like KUAR Little Rock, WBFO Buffalo, Maine Public, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, and Texas Public Radio -- and pointed them back at their current feeds, so they tune and play instead of coming up quiet. A few whose streams have genuinely gone away are set aside for now, so the dial does not hand you dead air where a station used to be.
• The engine never repeats itself exactly anymore. Even with clean loops, a careful ear could catch the engine sound recurring on a perfectly fixed cycle at steady revs. Each layer of the engine voice now wanders very slightly in speed and level -- the way a real engine's rhythm breathes -- so there is no fixed cycle left to notice.
• The repeat key gives back the hazard warning, not the assist that talked over it. With automatic emergency braking on, "Emergency braking engaged." cuts in over the warning that set it off. Stepping back with the repeat key then handed you the assist announcement, so the warning you actually missed sat one press further away than you would expect. The assist no longer takes a place in the repeat history, and one step back from a collision reaches "Brake now!" again. You still hear it at the time, and it stays in the message review list.
• Cruise control holds your speed down a hill instead of running away with it. Coasting was all cruise could do about going too fast, so a downgrade just carried the truck past the speed you set and kept it there -- a gentle two percent grade sat nine over, and a steep one kept building with nothing to stop it. Now cruise uses the engine brake the way you would, stepping it up only as far as the hill needs, and comes down on the service brakes in proper snubs when the jake alone will not hold. The old behavior dragged the brakes lightly and forever instead, which quietly emptied the air tanks until the spring brakes set and stopped the truck dead on a downhill.
• Cruise control answers a hill as you reach it, not ten seconds later. It used to feed the throttle in slowly with no idea what the grade was asking for, so every climb cost you speed before it responded and a real pull could take twenty miles an hour off the truck. Cruise now reads the grade under the wheels and gives it the throttle it needs right away.
• The automatic gearbox downshifts for a hill instead of lugging up it. With the accelerator on the floor, the road going up, and the truck still losing ground, the box used to hold top gear because the engine had not quite started lugging yet -- so the truck sank toward a crawl in a gear that could never pull it. It now goes looking for a lower gear, the way a driver does, as long as that gear genuinely turns the load better.
• A hill no longer rewrites your cruise speed for the rest of the run. On the All assists setting, descent control lowered your cruising speed to 55 the moment a grade steepened -- and left it there afterward, on the flat and uphill too, until you noticed and set it again. The safe descent speed is now a ceiling that lasts only as long as the hill; your number comes back at the bottom.
• Route-transition assistance no longer traps the truck short of a stop bar. If you braked yourself while the assistance was already braking for a stop sign or a red light, the truck could come to rest a little short of the line, in a spot where the assistance kept holding the pedals but never finished the stop. The accelerator did nothing and the truck could not be moved again for the rest of the drive. Coming to a stop short of the line now hands the pedals straight back, and you are told how far ahead the bar is so you can drive up and stop again on it.
• Long local approaches step down like real streets. A facility approach longer than a couple of miles now runs 45 on the wide-out stretch, drops to 25 for the last two miles, and 15 at the gate -- instead of a blanket 25 crawl from the moment you left the yard. Short approaches and the gate zone are unchanged.
• No more 35-mile deadheads to a local pickup. Some facilities' map pins landed counties away from their city, and the local deadhead drive to them stretched to thirty-plus straight-line miles. Local approaches now stay between about two and nine miles -- the range a real cross-town deadhead runs -- while the misplaced pins get properly re-mapped.
• A same-city dispatch no longer zones the whole interstate at 25. A job from one facility to another inside the same city -- yard to cross-dock around the interstate loop -- was mistaken for a facility street approach, blanketing the entire highway run in the 25 mile per hour access-road zone and silencing its curve and limit warnings. Real street chains keep their street speeds; highway miles keep highway rules.
• Automatic shifts sound like a real gear change now: clunk, sigh, clunk. During a shift the engine used to hang frozen at its old revs through the whole interruption, then leap to the new pitch all at once -- and the moment the gear actually took was silent. Now the revs audibly fall away toward the next gear while the box is between gears, exactly like a real automated manual, and the gear taking hold gets its own soft clunk as the engine picks the load back up.
• The engine stopped ticking and the jake stopped breathing. A faint click repeated in the engine sound at cruise -- speeding up and slowing down with the revs -- and the jake brake's growl carried a little dip that pulsed on every cycle. Two culprits, both fixed: the seams where those sounds loop are now clean, and a stray click that had been recorded inside the engine sound itself -- repeating on every pass -- has been patched out. No tick at any speed, no pulse in the growl.
• Curve warnings now come with time to act on them. At compressed time pacing, "Curve right, half a mile" could go from spoken to "too fast" in three real seconds. Any bend the game warns you about now plays out in real time from the moment its warning window opens until the curve is behind you -- the same rule controlled ramp endings already follow -- so the callout, your reaction, and the braking all get real seconds at any time compression.
• "The scale comes first" now actually reaches you. Pressing the rest key with an open weigh station ahead was supposed to tell you the scale comes first and rest planning can wait -- but that line could lose a race against other things being said and never reach your ears at all, so pressing the rest key looked like it did nothing. It now always gets through.
• The driving speech settings explain themselves again. A rewrite of the Driving speech row's help text dropped the line explaining that the rate, pitch, volume, and voice rows only show up when your voice supports them, and that a screen reader sets those four itself. It is back, now on the Driving event voice row.
• A stalled engine, a carrier-grounded tractor, and a snapped tire chain now speak on Quiet and Urgent only. These three were wrongly grouped with routine confirmations, so on the two quietest driving speech settings they played a short sound instead of telling you the engine died and how to restart it, that dispatch took your tractor and put you in another one, or that a chain let go and the set is now scrap. All three speak as words on every driving speech setting now.
• "Back on the pavement" now shows up in message review on Urgent only. On the quietest driving speech setting this line spoke no words, played no sound, and used to skip the message log too, so there was no way to confirm the truck was back on the road. It now always reaches the log.
• "Save and quit to main menu" no longer silently discards the delivery (previously Continue always returned to the city with the job gone).

Removed

• SRAL DLL dependency (replaced by the Prism Python package).
• Legacy prototype files and duplicate data files.

Compatibility

• All 21 original cities and all 27 original direct legs are preserved verbatim, so old profiles and mid-trip snapshots load and resume unchanged.

Complete change list

This first snapshot contains more player-facing changes than fit on the GitHub release page. Read CHANGELOG.md in the download for the complete curated list.